Conferences
University of Alicante
Four international experts in visual sociology, emotions, art, images, bodies, exclusion, memory, and society.
The workshop Affective Visuality: The Question of Emotion in Visual Research will feature four keynote lectures that will explore, from various theoretical and methodological perspectives, the role of images in the production, expression, and interpretation of emotions.
Canadá
Toward Decoloniality: Social Reflections on Visual Aesthetics
This lecture analyzes the limits of vision and how they might be perceived from the researcher’s perspective. It examines, from a theoretical perspective, the evolution of concepts and seeks to bring to light the often-hidden relationship between the viewer and the representation, along with the processes, stances, and commitments this may require of researchers.
Ariella Azoulay advocates for “ontological resistance” as a response to the appropriation and destruction of political-material worlds in art, showing how colonial violence is “frozen” in objects and how the “whitewashing of images through art” conceals injustice.
How can researchers account for persistent structural disadvantage and give attention to alternative, community-rooted artistic practices without reinforcing imperial divisions? For Azoulay, modern art is not a historical category, but an imperial condition. Without a world that unites us—one marked by violence and in need of collective redress—we cannot conceive of the research process in any other way.
Resume
Carolina Cambre is an Argentine-Canadian scholar whose research focuses on representation, combining approaches such as semiotics, digital sociological theory, and key concepts from visual cultural studies, communication, and discourse analysis. Her interests include image studies, visual pedagogies, critical policy analysis, and critical visual sociology, with a strong concern for social justice, community, and identity. Her work is framed within an anti-oppressive, feminist, trauma-informed pedagogical perspective, with sensitivity to decolonial and anti-colonial approaches. She is currently developing projects in Mexico and Argentina.
human rights activist
Turkey
The Anatomy of the “Refugee’s Refugee”: Biopolitical Exclusion and the Emotional Regime Among Syrian Roma Traveling Communities—Dom and Abdal—
This lecture examines the experiences of displacement among the Syrian Dom and Abdal communities—peripatetic/Roma communities—who have faced systematic exclusion as “the other refugees” in the Middle East following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011.
Drawing on data collected during sociological and visual ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, this study offers an alternative perspective based on intersectionality, through the lens of “emotions, bodies, and sensibilities.” Dom and Abdal refugees, conceptualized as “the lowest of the low,” are excluded from the biopolitical registration systems of modern states, condemning them to a structural “bare life.”
However, these scarred bodies are not merely passive victims of sovereign power: through documentary photography and domestic ethnographies, the lecture shows how they position themselves as dignified subjects who engage the viewer, conceptualizing their cultural practices as a “counter-emotional regime” and an embodied strategy of resistance through joy.
Resume
Kemal Vural Tarlan is a researcher and documentary photographer. Since 2000, he has conducted visual sociology and anthropological research among Dom Roma communities living in the Middle East. His studies, articles, and photographs have been presented at numerous international symposia, conferences, exhibitions, and events. In 2013 and 2014, he worked on Syria in Transit, a travelling exhibition shown in London, Berlin, Kiel, Madrid, Frankfurt, Istanbul, and Gaziantep. He lives in Gaziantep, where he is General Coordinator of Kirkayak Kültür and Director of the Centre for Migration and Cultural Studies for the Middle East.
España
Art and Emotions: Images as Living and Frozen Emotions
Science is presented as objective knowledge of nature; morality and ethics, as the shared will of society; and art, as the emotion of the being who inhabits the world in a unique way. The artist experiences nature, society, and his or her own body in and of itself, and thereby transcends them.
It feels, therefore it exists. It is capable of giving aesthetic and material form to its affects, passions, moods, feelings, and emotions. Like a tuning fork, the artist vibrates with emotions and transmits them into the air, which is moved, revealing their particular way of being-and-existing-in-the-world.
Art is living feeling because emotion, even when it looks to the past or the future, only happens in the present. Frozen emotions are dead emotions, and stagnant water turns no mill: all images are art and living feeling; all images are frozen and dead emotions.
Resume
Eduardo Bericat is a sociologist and social researcher, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Seville. He has carried out research stays at the Universities of Michigan, California, Essex, Eurofound, Buenos Aires, and Middlesex. Throughout his career, he has directed several research centres and coordinated more than forty research projects in the Social Sciences. He was the founder of the Sociology of Emotions Group of the Spanish Federation of Sociology and is a member of the Executive Committee of the Sociology of Emotions Research Network of the European Sociological Association.
España
Emotions as a Bridge to Understanding the Future of Images and Society
Sociology is today developing a pluralistic, methodological and epistemological approach to the world of images: artistic, photographic, videographic and cinematic. This lecture uses a content analysis perspective which, although not yet widely known, has existed at least since the 1930s.
This lecture proposes interpreting the meaning of images from the perspective of Weberian interpretive sociology, in relation to the social, visual hermeneutics, and the iconological method of analysis. It addresses the concepts of “future” and “emotion” and their interrelations. The future is understood as a cultural fact and a sociocultural construction, while emotions are considered to generate feelings, identifications, and memories through images, perhaps even more powerfully than words.
The lecture concludes that emotions constitute a bridge for understanding the future of images and of society.
Resume
Juan A. Roche Cárcel is Professor of Sociology at the University of Alicante. He is Vice-President of REDISS, Director of the International Research Group on the Sociology of Emotions, Bodies and Sensibilities (EMOCS) at the University of Alicante, and Director of the book series La Lechuza Sociológica de las Artes. He has delivered lectures and doctoral courses at universities in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Turkey, Mexico, Italy, France, the United States, and Peru, among other countries. His recent publications include works on emotions, photographic social documents, culture and society, creativity, and the contemporary imaginary.